Mobile Group Dynamics in Large-Scale Collaborative Virtual Environments

Abstract

We have developed techniques called Mobile Group Dynamics (MGDs), which help groups of people to work together while they travel around large-scale virtual environments. MGDs explicitly showed the groups that people had formed themselves into, and helped people move around together and communicate over extended distances. The techniques were evaluated in the context of an urban planning application, by providing one batch of participants with MGDs and another with an interface based on conventional collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). Participants with MGDs spent nearly twice as much time in close proximity (within 10m of their nearest neighbor), communicated seven times more than participants with a conventional interface, and exhibited real-world patterns of behavior such as staying together over an extended period of time and regrouping after periods of separation. The study has implications for CVE designers, because it shows how MGDs improves groupwork in CVEs.

Using mobile group dynamics and virtual time to improve teamwork in large-scale collaborative virtual environments

“…Previous research showed how even a basic set of MGDs techniques helped users communicate while they traveled around a virtual urban development and reviewed its design [4]. However, two major areas for improvement were also identified.…”

“…Participants used two adjacent computers, one for the CVE and the other for the urban planning report write-up. The CVE application, environment and experimental procedure were the same as in [4].…”

“…First, all of the utterances from two previous studies of synchronous teamwork in CVEs [4] [5] were divided into blocks of communication and categorized as either task-specific or not. The latter were discarded to avoid cluttering the CVE with irrelevant utterances (e.g., idle chat).…”

“…Participants were run in two batches. In the first of these (the teleporting condition), participants had all the basic MGD functionality from [4], and new MGD functionality to provide awareness of who was talking, who was within hearing range and teleporting. Participants in the second batch were provided with multiple views (the multiple views condition), in addition to all the MGD functionality that was provided to the other batch of participants.…”

“…Historically, users have had difficulty understanding the actions of others in CVEs [2], [3], and the problems mushroom in a large-scale environment (e.g., a virtual building or city) because of the extra challenges of navigating and locating the whereabouts of one's collaborators. To help with this we've developed techniques called Mobile Group Dynamics (MGDs), which helped groups of people work together while they traveled around large-scale CVEs [4].…”